“Let’s go,” Lita said primly.
Dave nodded, and they said goodbye to the people on their way as they headed back toward the front of the house. On the drive, a Jeep and a pickup were both attempting to turn around without hitting each other. Farther up the lane, green palo verde trees glowed red with the taillights of departing partiers.
Vern Hastings’ truck was still parked in front of theirs, but whoever had pulled in behind them had left, so it was easy to back up and pivot about. Although everyone else who was leaving early had turned left, toward town, they turned right, into the desert, toward home. The land was dark but the sky was bright, filled with both a full moon and, incongruously, a visible field of stars.
Something swooped low over the top of the pickup.
Dave slammed on the brakes, nearly driving them into a ditch. “What the hell was that?”
Lita didn’t know, but she had seen it too, a shadow that passed over the windshield, briefly blotting out the moon and stars, and she’d felt an instinctive terror, an inner recoiling that raised goose bumps on her arms and left her shivering. Like Dave, she twisted her neck sideways and ducked her head down in order to look up through the windshield, but it was gone, whatever it was, and there were no dark shapes moving across any portion of the sky.
She straightened up, glancing over at Dave, who looked back at her with a confused expression. “That was weird,” he said.
She nodded.
“What do you think it was?”
“I have no idea.”
“A vulture?”
Lita shook her head. She might not know what it was, but she knew what it wasn’t, and it was neither a bird nor a plane nor anything she had seen before. It was strange, and she didn’t like it, and though she’d been granted even less than a glimpse, just a suggestion of darkness more sensed than seen, she hoped she never saw it again.
She shivered as Dave put the truck into gear and continued on toward home.
They made it back without incident. Later, after showering together, they made love to see in the new year, and in the middle of it, from far away, she heard faint popping sounds.
At the party, the guns were going off.
SEVEN
It had been over three hours, and his knees hurt so much that he doubted he would be able to stand without rolling onto his side first and then pushing himself up with his hands, but Father Ramos remained kneeling, hands folded in supplication as he continued to pray. It was good that his knees hurt. They should be bloody. His legs should be broken. He should be in constant torturing pain for the rest of his life.
He had been there.
He had seen it.
He was a part of what had happened.
He closed his eyes even more tightly, squeezing out a tear and letting it roll slowly, unobstructed, down his cheek. He asked for God’s guidance, but heard nothing back, felt nothing. No ideas implanted themselves in his brain, no helpful advice was presented to him. Either God was deliberately ignoring his entreaties or—
There was a voice.
Father Ramos stopped praying, silencing the words in his head and listening for sounds in the stillness of the church.
It came again, a word.
“Hector.”
His heart pounded so hard he thought it was going to burst. The ecstasy he’d always assumed he would feel should the Lord actually speak to him directly did not materialize. Instead, he was overcome with terror, a paralyzing fear that rooted him in place, even as he heard his name called again.
“Hector.”
He should have run from the party as soon as it happened. He should have fled this town and never looked back. But that was animal instinct, gut not head. That was a human reaction. For while, as a man he might want to flee, as a priest, he knew that he could not. God was everywhere and He would know where he went and what he did. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, was exactly what he had done: remain and pray on it. If he was to be punished, so be it. If Magdalena was to be wiped off the map, its memory erased from the world, then that was what would be. It was the Lord’s decision to make, and whatever He chose would be right.
Father Ramos thought of Sodom and Gomorrah and how, when the angels visited Lot, the people of the town demanded that Lot surrender the angels to them. The people were struck blind, and the next day their cities were destroyed.
Was that what would happen here?
“Hector.”
He was sobbing, and was dimly aware that he’d wet his pants.
There was another sound in the empty church. A shuffling noise behind him, as though something large and barely mobile was shambling slowly across the concrete floor toward the front of the church. The priest closed his eyes even more tightly, so tightly they hurt, his lips mouthing a fervent prayer.